“Yes, this life is the war of the False and the True, Yet this life is a truth, though so complex to view That its latent veracity few of us find.... Ay, the world but a frivolous phantasm seems, And mankind in the mass but as motes in sunbeams; But when Fate, from the midst of this frivolous nature, Selects for her purpose some frail human creature, And the Angel of Sorrow, outstretching a wan Forefinger to mark him, strikes down from the man The false life that hid him, the man’s self appears A solemn reality: Him the dread spheres Of heaven and hell with their forces dispute, And dare we be indifferent? Hence, and be mute, Light scoffer, vain trifler! Through all thou discernest A Greater than thou is at work, and in earnest; And he who dares trifle with man, trifles too With man’s awful Maker.”... _HARAN TAKEN: TERAH LEFT._ GENESIS xi. 28. There is a pathetic significance in what to the unobserving reader might seem a dry record of decease, commonplace among other commonplaces, in the fact mentioned concerning the house of Terah, the father of Abraham,—that “Haran died before his father Terah in the land of his nativity, in Ur of the Chaldees.” It is, as Canon Melvill says, like an inversion of the natural order, when we see parents performing the last office to their children: we feel it natural that children should close the eyes, and shroud the limbs of fathers and mothers, but unnatural that fathers and mothers should perform these sad duties for children. “Haran should have followed Terah, and not Terah Haran.” A great French moralist, in his exposition of the sublime intensity of a father’s love, goes on to say of the tie, the _lien_, which unites devoted parent to endeared child, “Et la nature brise ce lien. Elle jette au tombeau cette vie qui commence, et condamne le père à rester vivant.” A tender poet of our day was writing from such an experience—not in his case an isolated one—when bewailing the gem of his hearth, his household pride, who, could love have saved from death, would have found a father’s love, and a mother’s, stronger than death: “Humbly we bow to Fate’s decree; Yet had we hoped that Time should see Thee mourn for us, not us for thee.”